According to the Nets’ press release, here’s the background on the flagpole:

“After the Dodgers’ former home, Ebbets Field, was demolished in 1960, the flagpole was later donated to a VFW post on Utica Avenue in the Brooklyn neighborhood of East Flatbush. It stood at that site, which later became the Canarsie Casket Company and then a church, until Bruce Ratner secured the historic flagpole in 2007, with the goal of positioning it at his planned arena in Brooklyn, which opened in September of this year. It was Markowitz who had alerted Ratner about the availability of the flagpole.”

I didn’t have to attend this one to promise that Markowitz told his story about being crushed as a young boy when he found out his beloved Dodgers were skipping town. Maybe someday some kid in North Jersey will grow up to be the mayor of East Rutherford or Newark, and tell a similar tale of the Nets’ slightly less-distant move across two rivers to Brooklyn.